Why Human Rights Requires Free Software

Human rights is the global currency of modern politics.
Whenever the United States attacks a country, diplomatically
or physically, it cites human rights claims. And by a
not-so-surprising irony, the critics of the United States
and its allies complain of human rights violations as well.

So human rights workers should be universally feted and
supported. Instead, however, they are chronically
underfunded, goaded to justify every detail of their work,
and threatened with dire harm.

Patrick is
best known
for the eight hours of testimony he gave before an
international criminal tribunal at The Hague to show that
Serbian atrocities, and not NATO bombing or Kosovo
Liberation Army aggression, were responsible for the mass
deaths and displacement of Kosovo Albanians. His evidence
was drawn from a statistical correlation of many sources,
including thousands of interviews made by three human rights
organizations of fleeing Albanians, sometimes within hours
of the killings and destruction they witnessed.

Patrick's venues have ranged from Haiti to Sri Lanka; at his talk, he
discussed recent visits to Guatemala and Sierra Leone. His gruesome
specialty lies in accumulating many individual stories of death,
torture, and terror; correlating them to determine their degree of
consistency and reliability; and running statistics that show patterns
over time and geography.

One is struck by the incongruity between this horrific material and
Patrick's affable, down-home manner, but his dedication to ripping
away the masks of the world's evil and vindicating the memories of the
victims comes through clearly. As for his believability, an audience
member with a doctorate in statistics told me later, "This talk was
one of the most compact, yet clearest, presentations that I have ever
heard on what statistics can and cannot do."

There is a good deal of overlap between Patrick's work and
the mission of
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility,
which has recently started a project called
Privaterra, which
provides software support to human rights workers. The
creator of Privaterra, Robert Guerra, knows Patrick and
invited him to speak at the 2002 CPSR annual meeting. I recently
wrote a Weblog on
the conference.

So I was familiar with the subject of Patrick's work when he
started his lunchtime keynote, and was too busy stuffing my
face at the start to even bother taking notes. But my
thoughts really started churning when he unexpectedly
started giving accolades to free software. They brought a new
urgency to old debates. Here are his observations.

Accountability and Verification

Human rights workers, who hold powerful forces accountable
for their behavior, need to be accountable themselves for
all of the data and opinions they offer. This accountability
extends to the software they use. And only free software can
meet that requirement.

Imagine an American scientist bringing a closed, proprietary
encryption program or statistical package to political
activists in a foreign country and saying, "Just use this;
take my word that it works right." That's a non-starter. If
the software is open source, even though the human rights
staff might not be able to personally verify that it's
accurate and free of bias, they can take the source to a
university or other expert and have it vetted.

The same challenges arise when a human rights organization
publicly presents its results. The politicians, generals,
and other power-holders will dispute every step in
reasoning. A lot of an organization's credibility lies in
its process for collecting data and its use of statistics,
but the software has to be certified to be trustworthy, as
well. An open package whose source can be checked by any
technically qualified person removes a potential area of
dispute.

(As an aside, this consideration shows why it's a good idea
to use free software for any public or governmental
functions -- most of all for elections, where the reliability
of any software solution is questionable in the first
place.)